Technology Guardian: What has surprised you most about the rise and spread of the internet over the past 10 years?

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: What I find most amazing about the internet and the web is how quickly it has settled to become almost part of everyday life. It wasn't that long ago, maybe a dozen years, that nobody knew anything about it, except people in universities and research labs. If you talk to most people now and ask them about what life was like before the internet, you may as well be asking them about London in the world of horse and buggies.

TG: To what extent did you foresee this rapid rise when you became general manager of IBM's internet division?

IW-B: We were very, very excited but I don't think we knew how big it was going to be. People were saying in 1997 that if you were an existing business, you were toast, that the internet was reinventing all the rules of business, and only those businesses born to the web were going to make it because they had a special sensibility - where they realised it was only about eyeballs, it had nothing to do with revenue and profit and cash. We were maybe among the most aggressive saying No, no, no: anybody can leverage the internet for business value. And of course that's what turned out, that the internet became a major part of every business.

TG: To what extent did the success of your internet strategy make IBM's early embrace of open source much easier?

IW-B: There is no question whatsoever. As part of our internet strategy, we had already started to work with the Apache community. We had our own HTTP stack, which is the basic software that you need in every web server, and we abandoned it for [the open-source web server] Apache after a while, when our people told us that Apache was far better than anything we had.

And that got us working with the open communities. When Linux came along, our heads were already pointing in the right direction, and so it was much easier to embrace open source than it would have been otherwise.

TG: Sun has committed to releasing all of its code as open source. Do you think IBM will do the same?

IW-B: I don't think so, because I honestly don't think everybody wants to see all your code. Remember, the key to open source is not the ability to see the open software, it's the forming of a community around it that will participate in its development and its maintenance.

You cannot go in your closet and look for old code and throw it out there and tell people to form a community around it. They may say, Irving, that's legacy code that we have zero interest in working on. We continue to open source quite a bit of code, but we are fairly selective, and we work very closely with communities to decide whether to open source or not.

TG: Unlike, say, Microsoft, IBM seems not be to interested in competing directly with Google by developing its own web search engine. Are you not worried that you might be missing out on a huge sector of the future computer market by letting Google dominate this area?

IW-B: That's not our business model - to go after the consumer market. It's as if you said, well, Irving, why don't you, when you retire, become a professional football player? Look at David Beckham, look at the money he's getting in Los Angeles. Just because we are a powerful company with good R&D, doesn't mean that we have the skills that Google has in the consumer space. Frankly, the probability that we would score any goals is incredibly low.

TG: The latest emerging technology that you have championed is that of virtual worlds. How did you come across these?

IW-B: One of things I was very involved in IBM pre-internet was our supercomputing initiative, and parallel supercomputing in particular. In supercomputing, in scientific computing, in engineering, people work very hard at visualising the results of what they are simulating. Because if you don't visualise it, it becomes almost impossible to make sense of what you've calculated. So when games started being able to do more and more realistic visualisation, at far, far lower prices than with supercomputing, and they were applying it to whole different areas, virtual worlds and games, I thought about it as an extension of supercomputing.

TG: Recently, Sam Palmisano - IBM's president and CEO - appeared in Second Life. What was his reaction to both the suggestion and experience?

IW-B: Sam loved it. Sam has been following this for a while, because of IBM's involvement in the technologies for game players. Remember, we now have done the basic microprocessors for the three major game players: Nintendo's Wii, Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's Playstation 3.

We've held a number of technical strategy meetings with Sam, showing him the evolution of the gaming capabilities, including the world of massively multiplayer online games. So Sam was already attuned to this, and when we held the meeting in Beijing, and we recommended holding part of the meeting in Second Life in the Forbidden City virtual world, he loved it.

TG: Many people are sceptical about virtual worlds. IBM obviously thinks they are more than just a game: how will we be using them in the years to come?

IW-B: We see all kinds of things. It gets back to our ability to simulate just about anything and provide people with far more visual interfaces. For example, it would be fascinating to see where shopping goes as one of these applications.

The possibilities in learning and training are enormous: I've just been reading about using these kind of virtual visual capabilities to train surgeons for sophisticated surgical procedures. We are experimenting a lot in IBM on virtual meetings - in fact, IBM iis using Second Life extensively to hold virtual meetings with colleagues around the world.

TG: Does IBM have its own internal virtual world system - an intraworld running on its intranet?

We plan to build them; exactly how is all under discussion. We very much feel that many of our clients will want intraworlds in the same way they have intranets.

Then you want to make the navigation between the intraworlds and public worlds as seamless as possible.

TG: Looking back over your varied career, what do you see as the unifying thread?

I think that what I have enjoyed doing through the years is be very, very involved with advanced technologies, but figuring out how to make them successful in the marketplace.

And that requires you to have one foot in the labs and one foot firmly grounded in the marketplace - working with clients and others to understand their needs.